First anniversary!

[Oliver]

Hello everybody! In one week the forum reaches its first anniversary.

In this time the forum has evolved considerably, as has the number of e-cigarette designs! We've seen a strong community develop and continue to grow with a huge variety of people joining in.

We now have medical professionals, tinkerers, suppliers and general users all chatting, swapping ideas, helping newcomers out - in short a great group of people all united in one thing: trying to deal sensibly with an addiction that many have found impossible to break, and trying to do it in a safer fashion than has been afforded by tobacco products.

Who knows what the next year will bring - new technology? Better liquids? cheaper prices? One thing is for sure - we will be at the center, testing, tinkering, advising, complaining!

It's now been six months since the forum software was upgraded and I would love all members to take a minute to think about what, if anything, they would like improved in the site design, functionality or even rules of the site, and post it in this thread.....

Take care, and thanks for making this place what it is!

SmokeyJoe

 

[Soot]

Smokey - on occasion there's a "cpu time limit exceeded" message when I try and view the site. I don't think my ISP limits my usage and it's only this site that reports this cpu message.

Does the site have a CPU limit? If so, is it time to think of raising that limit? Would a financial contribution from members help that happen?

 

[TropicalBob]

A huge congratulations on the anniversary .. and I've watched this forum grow for about 11 of its 12 months! It has truly become "like family" to me.

 

[KatyS]

Well done, Smokey. This is the best forum I have been a part of and I will continue to benefit and contribute to it.

 

[dc2k08]

yep. well done SJ. i'm sure you wondered before you set up the forum whether you would get any members at all, amazing that it gets so much traffic and has such a dedicated and interesting user base. i use a few a different forums online, but this is definitely the one i come to most often. in others i haven't even racked up a third of the posts that i have here and i have used some of them for for years.

as for requests, i would like you to enable the whisper and spoiler bbcode in the comments, just cause it looks cool and i have never seen it enabled in any forum. you can see an example of how they work here:
Documentation :: BbCode Quick Reference

would love to be able to input html in the comments too of course but you probably wouldn't want that.

 

[jigtg]

Smokey - on occasion there's a "cpu time limit exceeded" message when I try and view the site. I don't think my ISP limits my usage and it's only this site that reports this cpu message.

Does the site have a CPU limit? If so, is it time to think of raising that limit? Would a financial contribution from members help that happen?

Buying more quota is not the first solution.
I wonder if you tried adding more indexes to sql tables. That should exchange cpu time to disk io. Perhaps this forum sw has some cache that isn't turned on..

 

[dnakr]

Congrats SmokeyJoe. I too have watched this forum grow and as TBob said, it does feel like family.

 

[Kate]

There is a real feeling of community spirit here. This is my favourite forum

 

[madog]

This place is awesome!!!

 

[Oliver]

Hi guys and thanks for your heartwarming responses.

I totally agree that we've got a great community here - and I certainly don't want that to change!

dc2k08 - when I started the place I really knew nothing about forums other than having been part of a couple, briefly, before.

I had no expectations whatsoever about traffic, I was just really curious about e-cigs and the only place I could ask about them was either foreign language boards or the ecig.org board which was owned by a supplier.

In fact, I was had only just received my first e-cig when I set the board up.

I called up my techie pal Rich and we sat down one night last year and spent a few hours setting it up.

It seems amazing that the place has become how it is now from that one night of -for me - confusion!

jigtg - you'll have to explain that a bit more - how do I go about adding the extra indeces?

 

[ApOsTle51]

..man ..feel the lurve !!!!

hehe , Happy Birthday e-cigarette forum.com . I can tell ya now , without this forum i would have given up on the e-cig completley after my initial super-mini experience.

The great volume of Information and help from all the great posters here have certainly helped me and i'm guessing, many many other to stay off the analogues and have a great e-smoking experience.

well done smokey and all the members for making it a great place to visit.

I love you all man ..... not as much as french pipe mind

 

[SMILIN]

Happy anniversary, SJ, and the forum, This is my 1 month non "kool"anniversary. I am happy, u r happy, we r happy. Thanks

 

[rustylug]

I have only been apart of 1 other forum before, and that was about motor bikes ....I came across e-cigs by mistake, then i found this forum. For me it has helped me set my self up as a reatiler and also because of the information on the froum i can now also best help my NEW customers with any Q's they have.

I have a bebo site for the e-cig thanks to this forum
I also have a youtube site thanks to this forum
And i also have a main site with this forums web address on it.
I also think i im the only person selling the e-cig in a shoping centre in full public view in Scotland " I may be wrong with that bit"

All in all i have found this fourm to be a good help for all looking for information about the E-Smoking

 

[Bertrand]

I wonder if you tried adding more indexes to sql tables. That should exchange cpu time to disk io. Perhaps this forum sw has some cache that isn't turned on..

A few caveats.

Sill misconfurations like caching switched off is definitely the first thing to look at.

Second, upgrade hardware if it's possible. Use top or something to see which bit of hardware is the bottleneck. (Disk use, memory use, cpu use.) I wouldn't trust the "cpu time" error message too much.

Third is possibly adding indices if you know what you're doing, but you should do some profiling first. They say first rule of optimization is "The slow bits are never where you think they are." Having said that, they are almost always where I think they are.. hehehe

Fourth: If you've already got a striped array, and a bunch of CPUs, you probably need to consider clustering. If it turned out in profiling that it's the database, mysql supports this, so it's fairly easy to run multiple database servers against a single web server. If it's not the database, you may be in trouble - few web developers seem to know much about distributed applications - but vbulletin may be an exception. You can't just hope for the best and anycast to a bunch of apache servers pointing at the same database cluster. Eg. vbulletin will almost certainly use session information, for instance, which won't automatically be synchronised. There are ways around this, but I'd first have a look in vbulletin forums, etc. since if you've hit a performance issue, I'm sure others have. (Eg. vbulletin may use some local files, which will need to get pointed to a network share for synchronization; it may not implement multicomputer blocking on access to said files which, will cause race conditions, etc.)

Hope this helps.

 

[Soot]

SmokeyJoe - Happy Birthday!

I've not been here for long but know the forum is more helpful than I thought it could be. It has been a great help in using e-cigs and always has something of interest to read.

For me, I actually think this aspect of the forum isn't its greatest value. Although it doesn't push e-cigs as a stop smoking device - nor does it support that kind of marketing - but it has nonetheless worked as a kind of support group for me.

I'm off the smokes, I feel much better and have achieved something I've tried many, many times but failed to do. I don't think e-cigs on their own (even if I was aware of what this site has informed me of) would have done it for me.

I can't put my finger on why - but I think it has something to do with the forum's approach that opposes the e-cig being a device of denial / a stop-smoking device. I also know it has a lot to do with the considerate discussions that occur here - and even a few that are more argumentative .

Does this make sense to anyone else? I could never have got anything from a stop smoking support group - but I've got a lot from this forum - and from the e-cig.

You've a lot to be proud of Smokey. Happy Birthday - may you have many more!

 

[TheEmperorOfIceCream]

Great work Joe and thanks for providing this unique forum. I've never posted anywhere before - but this community drew me out.

Emp

 

[Schroedinger's cat]

This is great fourm. Congratulations on the idea, Smokey Joe, and thank you for your work. Thanks also to all the forum participants, as I only took the plunge with e-cigs after having lurked here for a few weeks, and at that point I was, at least, semi-informed. Great and helpful members, and lots of interesting threads. I have never felt the need/desire to belong to a forum before, and I feel that I picked my first one very well indeed....

 

[tribalmasters]

GREAT STUFF!! Helped me out plenty and make good purchasing decisions for sure especially the 901 even with its poor batteries theres plenty of options to fix that!! I see no errors, caching is turned on and the forum is running highly efficiently. The SQL tables are 100 percent optimized!! The sun is almost shining and it isn't windy. There is no need to even type 'top' at a console! Computers crash and you try later

 

[Tetsab]

I will second/echo/repeat everything everyone has said above. Apart from the fact that this is the first forum I've EVER joined <grin>. Lurked sometimes for a while but never felt the urge to join in before.

Hit my half-century at the end of October and was feeling really uncomfortable (and unhealthy) about having spent well over half my life as a slave to tobacco I'm now making real progress.

Anyone know if there's anywhere we can vote for this site as a tip-top forum standing head and shoulders above the rest? Better yet, can we nominate Smokey Joe for a Nobel Peace Prize or something? Or a Medical one if people think that would be more appropriate? It can't be wholly untrue to suggest he may have saved lives and could save many more at the rate this forum's going and think he has every reason to feel seriously proud of that.

Congratulations on the anniversary SJ and hoping for many more. My heartfelt gratitude for founding another one of the really GOOD things on the Internet to counteract all the crap. All the best.

For some reason Smilies aren't working on my pc at the moment (my machine has a bit of a mind of its own sometine) so can everyone imagine a line along the bottom here, please:

*Big smiley* *Two thumbs up* *Big smiley* *Two thumbs up* *Big smiley*

 

[e-pipeman]

This forum is a never-ending source of pleasure and enjoyment. The fact that people are helpful, friendly and enthusiastic here really helps. A great, great forum for which many thanks!